


Writhe

by TheLightAtLastAndAlways



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28634841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightAtLastAndAlways/pseuds/TheLightAtLastAndAlways
Summary: For love, Endellion had made herself a monster. When that love cruely failed her, she welcomed the bliss of oblivion that would come when the jaws of death had finished their inevitable close. Close, so close, they came, but then she was snatched away. Not saved. Not by this man. What path can she walk in this place so far from home? What choices are left? What power does she have to make them?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

Endellion had hung in the manacles so long that her hands had swollen and split, like overripe fruit, and the equally swollen weight of her tongue made it nigh impossible to swallow. Something more blood than saliva dripped slowly from her parted lips; if it made a noise as it splashed against the flagstones, it was subsumed by the slow rasp of her breathing.

“So this how Rhosgiteyrn celebrates its heroes,” a male voice—smooth and low and accented—said from somewhere in the dark. If he stood within the cell, her eyes couldn’t pick him from the vague shadows.

Not that she had the strength left to lift her head—she hardly had the strength to force open her crusted eyes. The time for fighting the slow suffocation of her body was past and when she’d had the strength, she hadn’t had the spirit.

Betrayal had cut her in places that no knives could reach.

Her eyes slid shut again, her thoughts too sluggish and knotted too tight around her hurts to spare any for curiosity.

The voice was closer when it spoke again. “This is more starstruck than I would have used to contain a fellmage ten years declared abomination. How _much_ they must fear you.”

There was no hurry in his words, but a certain languid pleasure that reminded her of nothing so much as a cat well-pleased with itself as it brushed up against her legs, uncaring if it inconvenienced anyone so long as it got what it wanted. And what it wanted—a frisson of unease chased its way up her spine at the way he seemed to glory in the knowledge of Rhos’ fear.

A hand cupped her jaw, angling her head upward. It was probably meant gently, but the act of existence ached; this made it _howl_. It was incentive enough—just—to force open her eyes again, though they refused to focus on the form now eerily lit by a ruddy magelight, like a fiend who’d forced itself up from the pit.

“What a waste it would be to let you pass from this world like this—a mage unmatched in Rhosgiteyrn and, I suspect, spectacular even beyond the bounds of your muddy little country. And to do it all and claim to be unblooded,” there was something of dark delight in his tone, “now _that_ would make you a true monster of God.

“You will find that I am more grateful than your countrymen and not nearly so short-sighted. What you’ve done here—killing a fellmage alone, with unmagical companions who must have been no better than pack mules—I would have you do that for me. For Sagiensis. Only I will not repay you with imprisonment and starstruck and hatred. I will shower you with wealth. Slaves. The kind of fear that tastes sweet on the tongue.”

She’d had just enough of herself left to be startled at the mention of Sagiensis, but that offer demanded an answer. The first sounds she made weren’t recognizable as words—they were animal sounds, pain sounds. “…don’t need…money,” she rasped at last, though the words were hardly recognizable even to herself. “…don’t…want…slaves. Just want…to be…finished.”

Starstruck—metal not of this earth—prevented her magic from healing her body, but something about what she had done to herself when she’d torn down Cresil had made her resilient beyond what humans could normally bear. When all she wanted was to at last pass beyond the stars, her body chained her more surely than the starstruck.

“Well, that’s what you think now, broken and accustomed to kneeling. I think you’ll find yourself of a different mind when you’re no longer in this wretched little country. This will feel worse before it gets better,” he warned her as he released her jaw and stepped back in a susurrus of cloth. “Start removing the chains.”

More people—had they killed her guards?—surged around him out of the shadows. Hands were at her wrists and then the shackles gave way and she keened as her body collapsed on itself, the weight of the chains that still bound her to the floor too much. Her knees drove up against her ribs and she couldn’t cry out—couldn’t catch her breath and there was a little space where her world shrank to trying to breathe, her body overriding her desire to be finished.

When she was herself again, she found that they had removed most of the chains that had anchored her to the floor, but the collar with its terrible, inward-facing blunt spikes was still in place.

“Hold,” the man ordered and the people around her stilled. “Just a little caution from me, you understand. Help her rise.”

They didn’t help her to stand; rather, they helped her to her knees as he strode forward. There was something she couldn’t make out in his hands. “Remove the collar,” he said and hands rushed to obey; Dell hardly felt the first stir of her power before some new thing closed about her throat.

Her magic _twisted_ , which wasn’t—it was like having her heart turn over in her chest, wrong and strange and painful. Her ears began to ring as waves of hot and cold swept over her, pulling her down into a darkness that was nothing like freedom.

* * *

Dell came to herself with a terrible disorientation that grew more panicked at it persisted—it grew worse when she thought she caught movement from the corner of her eye, the shift of Cresil’s coils, but no—no, Cresil was dead. His blood had seeped from between her teeth until there wasn’t any more for his hearts to press out.

There was no comfort in that knowing, because now she remembered what had come after, though that only made the confusion worse. The surface beneath her was soft and giving and smelled not at all like that distinctive reek of fear and rotting rushes and human excrement that characterized the cell that had been her world for weeks.

The prominent bones of her wrists where they lay against the elaborate cutwork of the covers kept her from thinking it a dream; so too did the weakness of her body as she gingerly pushed herself upright. She had never run to stoutness like so many of her fellow Rhosgi mages, cloistered as they were with only the consolation of books and alcohol for their inability to leave their bodmin without the permission or direction of a Prince, but she hadn’t been this wretched thing—skin stretched tight over bone.

The bedding itself was unfamiliar and not just because it was clean.

Rhos was a place of damp cold and commoners kept layers of quilts on their beds, nobles heavily embroidered velvets. There were layers here, but they were whisper-light and seemed more designed to showcase the colors of the layers beneath as exposed by the cutwork than to offer warmth. The same held true of the panels that surrounded the bed. She had seen cabinet-beds before—they were common in bodmin—but these were at first glance purely ornamental, decoration for the sake of it rather than to keep the night from stealing a body’s warmth. Unfamiliar birds with long, sweeping tails carried gleaming stones the size of apples in their talons, the blue striking against the dark wood.

Perhaps if her nerves weren’t scraped raw, she wouldn’t have sensed them; the wards anchored in the stones were all but silent. As she reached out a cautious hand to investigate, she realized that the movement that had caught her eye hadn’t been a product of her imagination. There was someone standing on the raised platform created by the flowing tails.

Faintly luminous eyes took care not to meet her gaze directly before the figure—slender, female, and yunchuo—bowed. Not the bend of the waist that Dell had seen servants give to Rhosgi princes. She went to her knees, bent her back, and pressed her forehead to the back of her hands. She stayed in that position for a long moment before rising to her knees.

“Magistra, the Reál has eagerly anticipated your awakening. His Eminence expressed his desire to dine with you if you awoke before the Three Graces crowned. May I call the others in to help you dress?”

Her weeks in prison had done a great deal to rid her of any sense of bodily shame—she had taken about the same amount of notice of her clean skin as she had of the clean sheets. With her slowly growing conviction that she was no longer in Rhos, however, came the fear that they had collected blood or hair or cuttings of her nails, any of which could be turned against a mage.

The man who’d come to her in her cell had spoken of Sagiensis and, while not identical, there was great similarity in this yunchuo’s accent; there was also that startling and unfamiliar architecture that featured among other things walls that were more decorative negative space than stone. Moonlight spilled into the room from arches twice the height of a man. 

“Magistra?” the woman asked again.

“Yes,” Dell replied, dredging up the wherewithal to answer the woman.

There was no friendship lost between Rhos and Sagiensis—there was in fact a long and bitter enmity—but they still shared a living relic of the Abarrane empire, which had held sway over the entire continent for a thousand years. This was long enough for many of the original languages to fade to nothing but academic curiosities, leaving large swathes of Sahar speaking a common tongue, but ten thousand years probably wouldn’t have been sufficient to quell the regional tensions of so vast an area. When the last of the Abarrane empresses had fallen, old hatreds had been resurrected and where they hadn’t been sufficient, new ones had been invented.

Dell managed to slide her legs off the edge of the bed onto the raised platform formed by the tails of the birds before the doors closed behind two further servants, who both performed that strange bow again before they crossed to one side of the room. What she had thought to be a solid wall, painted with an elaborate mural to the height of about eight rods, had a panel that could be slid back to expose a second room.

“May I help you rise, magistra?” the woman who’d been set to watch over her sleep asked.

Dell considered the weakness of her limbs, then considered what it would mean to expose weakness in this country where she had many more questions than she had allies.

“No need,” she decided aloud and rose with only a little coltish trembling. That was largely disguised by the strange garment she wore, which had not nearly as much fabric as a shift and no sleeves at all. 

She managed not to fall as she crossed the room, though by the time she’d reached the other she was grateful that the woman hovering at her elbow indicated she should first settle herself on a bench situated in front of a table that had a mirror mounted behind it. She’d seen mirrors before, though the ones in the bodmin were purposely flawed to prevent mirror magic, and knew of vanity tables, but she’d never seen quite such an array of bottles outside the potion storage cabinets.

They had, somehow, in the course of bathing her managed to untangle the greasy, matted locks of her hair, which fell in thick chestnut waves to her shoulder-blades. Her skin looked merely Rhosgi pale rather than sallow, but her cheekbones and jawline were stark without any fat to soften them. Her eyes had always been dark enough that it was difficult to delineate pupil from iris, but the bruising beneath them seemed to give them a blue-violet cast.

Even thin as she was, though, she was still broader across the shoulder than the yunchuo who was gathering supplies from atop the vanity. Almost inhumanly slender, golden-skinned, with slanted eyes and ears, her black hair was a waterfall to her waist. Her long, floor-sweeping tail looked like a long-furred dog’s, but she hadn’t the antlers of the yunchuo from the stories she’d read as a child, though neither had any of the yunchuo she’d met once she left the bodmin. 

The yunchuo had steady hands as she deftly applied more paint than Dell had ever worn in her life and worn in ways that would doubtless baffle even the fashion-forward of Rhosgi. There was no effort made to mask her paleness, but there were bold strokes of black that framed her eyes and swept into a design that caressed her cheekbone and swept up toward her temple. Her lips were painted plum and her hair was carefully set in such a way as to compliment a headdress that had to have been bespelled, because for all its ominous dark metal it sat lightly atop the front of her head. It was crowned with spines that looked sharp enough to pierce flesh, with trailing ornaments from the two outermost spines that glimmered with dark stones. 

An involuntary shiver coursed through her as they brushed against the bare skin of her shoulders.

A stranger already stared back at her from the mirror, but the sense of dissociation with her own body only worsened as she was helped out of her sleeping attire and into appropriate underthings for the gown they dressed her in.

It was all of a piece, with a high-collared fitted bodice without sleeves and a skirt that was just wide enough to move easily in without the encumberment—or warmth—of petticoats. There was a belt that echoed the motif of the headdress and long gloves that were enchanted to remain fixed in place regardless of the thinness of her arms. 

This time, Dell didn’t try to catch sight of herself in the mirror.

She didn’t want to see what sort of pale and cadaverous horror they’d made of her, like something out of the stories that taught Rhosgi children that to bear magic was to stand on the cusp of evil from the moment they first drew breath. She’d heard the tales they told about Sagiensis, how they spilled blood like water to glut themselves on power, bathed in the blood of infants to maintain their youth, and sacrificed to fiends as if they were gods before serving them at the table of the Reál.

Dell had not believed all of the hundred thousand horrors attributed to this country, not when she knew what it was to be mage and feared herself, but there was a creeping doubt rooting itself behind her ribs.

Like everything since her waking, even that felt muted somehow, like this was a terrible dream and she was still in that distant cell waiting for death. She did not want it to be real, did not want to be following a collared yunchuo down a hall where the ruler of Sagiensis waited, but while her will could shape the world, it could not grant her this.

 _But it could_ , it occurred to her, her steps faltering as the possibility reared its head. Oh, it could not undo what had been done—could not make Talland fear her less or love her more—but it could allow her to escape from this palace.

Without starstruck to chain her, she could be free.


	2. Chapter 2

Her body was too weak to become the kind of beast that had dragged Cresil down—if she surrendered this tired human flesh for those gleaming scales and horns like twisted trees and wings like a terrible gale, its instincts and its hungers would wash away everything that made her Dell. She wasn’t yet so far gone she would willingly become the kind of monster that she had given everything to destroy.

That fiend-form, which would probably live on in song and story long beyond the yellowing of her bones, wasn’t the only one she was capable of taking. She might be in a strange country with neither money nor friends and her experience in the world outside the bodmin might number less than a handful of years, but she wasn’t afraid of death.

It wasn’t too much to say that she was looking for it.

The kind of magic that allowed her to shapechange had been ruled a branch of chaos magic, which was an illegal corruptive magic in Rhos; it certainly wasn’t anything that she had learned in the bodmin. Strange as it was, she owed this magic to Cresil, whose fall had been so terrible that the very weather began to twist and the fiends had multiplied well beyond the abilities of the princely households to subdue them. Talland and their party had been forced from the roads when a storm such as she hoped to never see again had swept down on them. Their baggage train had been all but lost and many lives spilled out onto the earth that night, as hail large enough to break bones fell from the sky and lightning scourged the land and the wind felt as if it would scour flesh from bone.

They had stumbled through some chance of fate upon a ruin. And it had been deep in that ruin, explored to escape the sensation of pervasive disdain of much of Talland’s group, that she had found the relics of a cult whose worship had centered on reshaping their bodies with chaos magic—which they had referred to it as being purified and remade.

It was not a strange thing to degrade into a fiend through chaos magic. This was the eventual fate of every fellmage, if they couldn’t be killed; what made it even more a perversion than magic itself was to elevate it to a religious ecstasy and to make it possible to wear a human face again after.

She had known the risk of it.

Dell had practiced it regardless, because she had loved Talland more than the bodmin’s empty ideals about magic. Because she had thought Talland returned her regard and would see it as sacrifice, not as a self-serving grasping of power.

She had been wrong, and Talland had turned from her for a throne, but the magic was with her still.

Now she called to the chaos that crawled just beneath her skin. Like all chaos magic, control was a matter of trying to hold water in one’s hand—it was pointless and foolish to concentrate on anything but the most relevant details.

_Wings. Larger than a dog, smaller than a horse._

It probably should have hurt, this reshaping of bones and sprouting of fur and feathers and scales, but instead it was a giddy feeling—something terrible and addictive and guilty.

Every day except this day.

Today it felt like the beast was trying to claw itself free of her flesh. Dell’s scream caught in her throat as she felt something draw tight around her neck and she clawed at the skin there as she fell to her knees. Her scrabbling fingers loosed the high collar of her gown and if she could have drawn breath, she’d have screamed again at the sight of the _things_ pressing up beneath her skin. The stretched-thin flesh showed black beneath and the liquid that seeped from the scratches she’d opened was too dark to be human blood.

“Magistra,” came a composed voice from the direction of the yunchuo who had been leading her. “The Reál will not allow you magic until you have spoken with him.”

Dell stared blankly at her for a long, choking moment before she relinquished her magic and allowed it to subside. The pain quickly followed, but the shock and the disgust had her stomach clenching and she had to swallow down the hot sourness in her mouth. 

She almost couldn’t rise under her own power, but a brusque hand gesture kept the servants—no, the slaves, there was no point in pretending—at bay when they would have helped her up.

Dell had known despair when Talland had put her in chains and it had settled in her bones, calcified her heart, but now a slow anger began to boil away the haze and left her raw to the fear of this stranger—she had only traded one set of chains for another, it seemed. 

The room they led her to was a courtyard open to the sky and the scented smoke that veiled the fiends carved below the roofline made it seem like they were writhing in the shifting light. There was a shallow pool beneath the sky vault, no more than an inch deep at present, and there were women clad in clinging silk dancing in the water and the smoke.

There was a man on a low couch watching the spectacle with every indication of boredom, slaves arranged around him, holding things that could just as well have been left on tables.

He was wearing even less clothes than the women, with his upper body bare but for an elaborate gorget about his neck. The exposed skin was a warm olive and he wore his dark hair with its blue-black waves long and partially pulled up with an elaborate goldwork diadem that glittered with rubies.

His skin was painted with gold and something that gleamed wetly red up his arms as he shifted to look at her—her skin crawled as he smiled and rose with predatory smoothness. “The hero of Rhosgiteyrn has woken at last.”

He made a sharp gesture with his hand and the women who had been dancing immediately bowed and removed themselves from the room, their pale silks trailing behind them like smoke. Without so much as glancing back, he said, “Bring in the meal.”

The slaves who’d been reduced to furniture bowed and retreated from the room and Dell clenched her teeth as the man—the Reál, the Blooded Sun, whose stories had spread like plague all those thousands of miles to her homeland—prowled toward her. She could walk for days when not a wasted shadow of herself and dodge a sword blade if she saw it coming, but mages were not encouraged to display anything like a tendency toward violence. Without access to the arcane, she was at his mercy.

There were no stories that claimed it as a quality he possessed.

Unlike the mages of Rhos, the body exposed by his lack of clothing as he prowled toward her was a powerful one, muscles shifting beneath his flesh in visible ridges. She stiffened as he grew close, then made to step back when he drew so near she could begin to feel the heat of his body. He was quicker than she in her weakened state, however, and as one hand closed over her wrist like a vise, the other grasped her chin and tilted her head back.

When he smiled, there was a sharp satisfaction there, and she could see that his eyes were an inhuman shade like the red that patterned his arms. “Endellion,” he said, tasting her name. “Endellion who dared. What a pretty story, to have such an ugly ending. It would have been such a pity, to leave you there. I can see in your eyes that you are not grateful. Not yet. A beaten dog must be taught to trust again, after all.”

“Can a chained dog learn to trust?” she asked him sharply.

“Oh? Have you already tested your binding? You have more spirit left than I thought you would with the sweet smell of starvation still clinging to you. But I won’t allow you to run. You’ll see.”

Slaves swirled around them, bringing in furniture and food, some of them presenting themselves with instruments. The Reál released his hold on her chin, but only changed his grip on her wrist to guide her toward one of the couches that had been carried in.

They were strange-looking things, with elaborately carved backs and only one arm. Dell thought that the Reál might crowd her against that arm and continue his invasion of her space, but he settled her like he was escorting her at a dinner party before crossing to the other coach and spreading his arms comfortably across the back.

“Serve the magistra carefully,” he warned the slaves. “You’ve followed my orders concerning her food?”

One of them bent deeply at the waist as she answered, never meeting the Reál’s gaze. “Yes, solya. The magistra’s portion was prepared with her health in mind and care was taken to select dishes that sit lightly in the stomach.”

Dell had attended exactly one banquet of state in Rhosgiteyrn and the ceremony there had been nothing so elaborate as the pageantry with which this meal was laid. It was served not on large platters along a table, out of which they would then be served, but in dozens of individually portioned plates and bowls that were settled on small tables in front of each couch.

A table groaning with the heads of boars, ribbons ‘round their tusks, swans with their heads replaced with golden effigies, and any number of elaborate sweets was a boast of wealth shouted—this was more an insidious whisper.

While his dancers might have been clad in clinging silks, the females who served him his meal were dressed more substantially, as were the males who were fluttering around her like a flight of brightly colored birds. Saying that she had never seen skin run such a gamut of colors would be to overstate her previous experience of the world—it was better to say that she had not even imagined the difference in the shades of grey between estellan. But here they were, one pearl-pale and another cloud-dark, with gleaming jewel-bright eyes and hair the blue of night, black horns erupting at their hairline and sweeping back over their skull before tipping upward. Slender yunchuo, ram-horned riegalt, crystal-encrusted varga, and humans in all their shades. Some more slender, some setting their plates down with muscles sliding beneath their skin like swordsmen.

For all that they were slaves, they looked better fed and were certainly better clothed than many of the Rhosgi peasants that she’d encountered during their campaign against Cresil.

Poverty had been their slave collar—it bound them to their land, kept them cowering in their houses, waiting to die in a place that at least had the warmth of memories to recommend it rather than starving in some strange place. Food had become a luxury commodity when the weather had turned and with so many fiends stalking the roads.

It was so strange to see so many well-fed, clean bodies in one place.

Had it been the same in the castle above her cell? There had never been servants sent down to clean and the knights and nobles and priests who’d come to stain themselves with her blood weren’t the sort to allow themselves to suffer even when others went short.

All the good men had ridden out and died in their turn against the fiend-tide, their noble wives holding out against siege and disease until they too perished, whether it was with spear in hand or hands clawing at their covers as they seized with fever caught while providing charity to their villagers.

What had been left had been those that had the blood but not the nobility of action that was meant to accompany the title.

Talland had said that to her often, in anger, towards the end.

He was their king now.

What did that make him?

Accustomed to doing what living there was left in her own mind, there was a jolt of fear that Dell could feel even in the roots of her teeth as she realized she’d lost focus in front of a very dangerous man.

“You’ll have to let me know what,” his hand made a gesture to the males who’d assembled themselves behind her chair, “best suits your taste. I don’t have males trained for the wardrobe or the chamber, so please make do with the maids I’ve assigned to you for the time being, but I can put on a splendid display at meals. The magistra of sufficient power to dine at my banquets have quite divergent demands. Sometimes I think they invent them just to see if I can accommodate. Though, as your country practices cloistering, perhaps you might need some time to discover your own preferences.”

“My…preferences?”

“In men. They say you tried to ensorcell that Rhosgi prince whose banner you rode under—shall I give you men who look like him to make kneel? Or has he spoiled your taste for blonds? You can ask for anything.”

“So if I demanded to be served only by virgins or men with hair red as spilled blood and pale as the face of the first moon or males born only under the dark of the moon?” she asked, feeling heat sear up the back of her neck and crest the tips of her ears.

“Virgins, is it? That’s common enough and one I’ll keep in mind when it’s time. For the second, that coloring is best expressed among the riegalt. The last would take little more searching—we keep much better birth records here in Sagiensis for ritual purposes. I could find you a slave born in the second hour of the summer solstice, if you so desired.”

“If I so desired,” Dell echoed. “If all your desires are so easily met as that, what do you want from me?” She braced her elbow against the single arm of her couch and allowed her cheek to rest against her fisted hand and hoped it looked indolent rather than being a signal of creeping exhaustion. She’d only been out of bed for less than an hour and already she felt like the headpiece was growing heavier. This time she didn’t flinch when the cold chains brushed against her bare shoulder.

“Do you not recall our first meeting? I want a hero,” he replied with an impish flash of teeth. “Your country would say that the only sin recognized by the state of Sagiensis is weakness. This is not quite true, but it is the sin I find most annoying. Your Cresil—and I still am in awe at how badly your paranoid priesthood failed to be useful for all their barking—sent a backlash through the world that wasn’t confined to your country alone. And some of my magisters and magistras, poised on the edge, fell off. Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, flicking several fingers toward the food from where his arms were still draped across the back of his couch. “If you’re tired, they are there to serve.”

She was hungry, but not so reckless that she’d eat before an emperor in his own country without an invitation. 

Dell might not be afraid of death, but she was starkly aware that there were an awful lot of awful things you could do to a person before bringing them to that point.

She did not look back toward the slaves waiting for her word. She straightened her posture and reached for the first thing that came to hand that wasn’t a liquid. It was a plate of strange little—she thought the closest thing Rhos had was pastries, but it wasn’t alike at all. The outer layer was smooth and strangely pliant, almost like a thin skin, and inside there was meat and an array of brightly colored vegetables.

The taste wasn’t familiar, but it was infinitely better than anything she’d eaten in recent memory.

“Those are better with dipping sauces.” He motioned for one of the maids serving him to explain the small bowls of liquids set to one side—apparently, rather than a dish being served in sauce according to a recipe, in Sagiensis it was more common to serve the food itself plainly and allow one’s guest to augment it according to their own taste.

 _The devils come offering comforts in your moment of weakness_ , she thought to herself as she watched him eat. “Your fellmages—you must have methods to deal with them yourself.”

“I do. But do you know what the most important thing is to a god?”

She stiffened, because just the existence of the Reál was blasphemy, let alone this talk of gods. “What do you—”

“Fear,” he answered firmly. “But when you live with a fear for so long, it fades. Think back to your war. In the beginning, you were too terrified to sleep. But at the end, didn’t you sleep whenever you could, no matter how the battle raged outside your shelter? It’s that. My magi no longer fear their Blooded Sun—and without fear of me, they don’t keep themselves in good order. I wonder if you would quiver at the thought of how many fellmages I have walking free in this empire. For them to fear me, the streets would have to run red like rivers, because they have seen all my rites and spectacles. But you—you’re rumors and shadows and a monster more terrible than all other monsters. Tell me, how do you think gods are born?”

Dell could hear her heartbeat loud in her ears. “That’s not a god. That’s still just a monster,” she said softly.

“This is the first line of holy writ ever taught to me.” His eyes seemed to flare briefly with their own light, like a glimpse of a falling star. “ _There is only one good god and He is not here_.”


End file.
